taxes

 

I’m truly tardy in getting this posted, but better late than never! One lesson I learned over the last 24 hours is that you can’t do a sleep study if you don’t sleep.

My Restless Leg Syndrome (now with a more respectable name, Willis-Ekbom disease) has been mostly under control lately. Thanks to new medication (the Neupro patch combined with Gabapentin) and a lot of fine-tuning on the dosage of both, I had two weeks symptom-free for the first time in decades!

That is, until last night!

I arrived at the sleep study center at 9pm…  After being hooked up with dozens of wires to various points on my head, face and body, I attempted to fall asleep. I did, almost immediately. And then, about three minutes later, I awoke. And that was it for my sleep last night.

I finally threw in the towel and got unhooked at about 2:30am, and didn’t fare any better at home.

So, I was more than a little toasty this morning. I made it through the show, got the podcast posted and set the show to repeat on the stream (as we do every day), and I crawled into bed and slept for almost four glorious hours!

I haven’t heard from my accountant yet, which means that I owe money, so he’ll file an extension.  And so it goes…

This morning on the show, I was joined by Barry Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church & State. We spoke about the recent rash of states attempting to enact their own version of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which he explained bear little resemblance to the original legislation of the same name – a topic about which he recently wrote for Huffington Post.

As today is Tax Day, I brought up another sore spot that Barry and I have discussed a number of times before — the insanity that is tax exempt status for churches. Having just watched the HBO documentary Getting Clear about Scientology, the idea that a cult of that magnitude is sitting on tax-free cash reserves of over a billion dollars should make everyone pause, especially today.

In the second hour of the show, Dave Johnson joined me to, once again, talk TPP. Fast Track or “Trade Promotion Authority” is expected to be introduced in the senate any time now, so it’s all hands on deck. Get caught up on Dave’s blog over at OurFuture.org, and call you senators and congressman now to voice your opinion.

Dave’s latest piece underscores one section of the TPP that is already, unbelievably, apparently in practice:

The World Trade Organization ruled this week that the United States is not being fair to Mexican seafood companies by denying “dolphin safe” labels on their tuna, meaning that American citizens won’t know whether they are buying tuna that is caught in a way that we deem would protect dolphins.

Let that sink in. A foreign trade court has prohibited the United States from letting citizens know what is or is not in a product. This non-U.S. “court” is nullifying our federal Dolphin Protection Consumer Information Act.

Excuse my while my head explodes!

Tomorrow, a look inside FloriDUH politics with Politico’s Marc Caputo, and lots more, radio or not!